A group of agents disagree about the appropriate inter temporal preferences to use when exploiting a common productive resource. They thus delegate decision making to a social planner who allocates consumption efficiently across heterogeneous individuals and over time. We define `policy...

This article examines the economic basis for what is termed "rational discounting," which entails full recognition of policy effects over time and exponential discounting at a riskless rate of return. Policies often cannot be ranked unambiguously in terms of their present or future orientation....

We demonstrate the social efficiency of investing in high-quality early childhood education using newly collected data from the HighScope Perry Preschool Project. The data analyzed are the longest follow-up of any randomized early childhood education program. Annual observations of participant...

This paper describes how three money's worth measures the benefit-to-tax ratio, the internal rate of return, and the net present value are calculated and used in analyses of social security reforms, including systems with privately managed individual accounts invested in equities. Declining...

Most discussions on the social rate of discount have assumed that the economy under consideration is isolated from the rest of the world, and that there are no capital movements. This paper explicitly analyzes the determination of the social rate of discount in a small open developing economy....

There is probably no specific problem in tax analysis which has generated as much study and discussion among economists as the question of how to formulate "neutral" tax incentives for investment. Yet no consensus has been reached concerning the proper approach to take when adjusting taxes....

The choice of discount rate has a significant impact on net benefit estimates when costs today have benefits over long time horizons. Standard U.S. government practice for cost-benefit analysis is to bound such analysis using two alternative rates. These rates are meant to represent the rate of...

To what degree should societies allow inequality to be inherited? What role should estate taxation play in shaping the intergenerational transmission of welfare? We explore these questions by modeling altruistically-linked individuals who experience privately observed taste or productivity...

A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels. Such a criterion is essential to resolve the optimal population problem, i.e., the tradeoff between population size and the welfare of each person...